Glossary:European Union (EU)
From Statistics Explained
The European Union, abbreviated as EU, is an economic and political union of 27 European countries. The EU was established on 1 November 1993 by the Treaty on European Union (Maastricht Treaty).
On 31 December 1994, the EU had 12 Member States: Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and the United Kingdom.
From January 1995, the EU added three Member States: Austria, Finland and Sweden.
In May 2004, 10 more countries joined the EU: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Slovenia and Slovakia. On 1 January 2007, Bulgaria and Romania became members of the EU.
The EU today has a surface area of 4,326,183 km², 499,673,325 inhabitants (1 January 2009 estimate) and 23 official languages. The EU Member States are as follows:
| Belgium | (BE) | France | (FR) | Austria | (AT) |
| Bulgaria | (BG) | Italy | (IT) | Poland | (PL) |
| Czech Republic | (CZ) | Cyprus | (CY) | Portugal | (PT) |
| Denmark | (DK) | Latvia | (LV) | Romania | (RO) |
| Germany | (DE) | Lithuania | (LT) | Slovenia | (SI) |
| Estonia | (EE) | Luxembourg | (LU) | Slovakia | (SK) |
| Ireland | (IE) | Hungary | (HU) | Finland | (FI) |
| Greece | (EL) | Malta | (MT) | Sweden | (SE) |
| Spain | (ES) | Netherlands | (NL) | United Kingdom | (UK) |
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